KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS rather than rent from a vendor who could withdraw or reprice. The rule is simple: rent the parts that are the same for everyone and getting cheaper, own the parts that are specific to the civic mission and getting more valuable. This build-versus-buy discipline is also what keeps the one-time build cost modest. A reviewer worried that building an institution implies building a vast bespoke software estate should note that most of the estate is assembled from commodity parts; the really custom work is the orchestration and the data model, which is a far smaller undertaking than it might first appear. The institution is expensive in the talent it retains and the coordination it does, as Chapter 16 shows, not in the volume of novel code it writes, because most of the code it needs already exists and only has to be wired together well. THE STACK, IN ESSENCE Eight reusable components, built once and configured per program. A new civic outcome is a new verified action and a new partner department bolted onto infrastructure that already exists and has already been audited, which is the entire reason the economics work. 86